Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about 14 ideas for high impact lead magnets. They discuss the types of things you can offer in exchange for email addresses.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
- The Micropreneur Academy
- Bidsketch
- GrowthHackers
- Digital Marketer
- Petovera.com
- Google AdWords Cheat Sheet from Software Promotions
Transcript
Mike [00:00]: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about 14 ideas for a high-impact lead magnets. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 248.
Mike [00:17]: Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob [00:25]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [00:26]: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Rob?
Rob [00:30]: New iTunes reviews, sir. We’re at 432 worldwide reviews in iTunes. We’re going to read a couple of verses from Nick Goede in the US, he says, “Inspiring and enjoyable. A great podcast to listen to. It’s full of actionable advice and every episode has inspired me.” We have [Cole Klav?] from Germany who says, “Very practical and I like the varied topics. A good Tuesday starts with Startups For The Rest Of Us. I don’t conceive riding my bike on a Tuesday without listening to a new episode. In fact, I will actually ride my bike in order to listen to a new episode of this podcast.” So thank you so much for the five-star reviews. If you haven’t given us a review, I appreciate it if you could log in to Stitcher or iTunes or whatever pod catcher you use. Give us a five-star review. Even if you don’t leave a review a full-on text, multi-sentence review, it really helps us, keeps us motivated. Mike reads this when he’s sad and alone.
Mike [01:22]: When I’m crying into my pillow.
Rob [01:24]: Exactly. And it helps us rank and it helps our [?] which is going to keep us producing the podcast. We’ve been doing it for five years and hopefully we can do it for another. How are things with you?
Mike [01:33]: Well, I recently took a short-term consultant gig and the impetus for that was to say, it doesn’t pay very much to be perfectly honest, so I definitely did not take it for the money but it has implications for potentially an audit shark sale down the road. And the people who are having me on this project, they basically have a enterprise-wide compliance projects that they need to have sold. So I was kind of brought in and tapped to go in and take a look at everything and help them put all the data together in a way that they needed to be done and I don’t know, we’ll see how it goes but it’s pretty exciting so far.
Rob [02:06]: Yeah. You haven’t consulted for more than a year I think, how was it to be back in the saddle?
Mike [2:10]: It’s interesting. It’s funny because I remember having to go through all these different projects that were just to complete nightmare and hassle and this one has been a dream so far. They just basically dropped the problem in my lap and said, “We know you know how to do this and so just do it and give us the results.”
Rob [02:25]: That’s the best kind, right?
Mike [02:27]: So they’ve just completely left me alone and just completely hands off. I barely talk to them at all. It’s just kind of I do my work and hand it over to them and that’s the end of it.
Rob [02:35]: Yeah, that’s nice. Cool. Good to hear that things are going well with that and hopefully it leads to the enterprise sale you’re looking for. So, I read a book.
Mike [02:42]: Congratulations.
Rob [2:43]: Yeah, it’s my first ever.
Mike [02:45]: Was that paper?
Rob [02:46]: It’s called Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And the Quest for a Fantastic Future. I have to say, I was really impressed with Elon Musk with the risks that he has taken. He made a bunch of money early on with an app. I don’t remember what it was called, it was before PayPal and he just reinvested it. He like put it all on the line. I mean that’s tough, man. It’s stuff to make several million. I think he made 10 million or 20 million from the first one and it was all back in to what eventually merged with PayPal. I think it was called x.com. And then he made 150-200 million from PayPal, put it all back in to SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity and he was basically, if these things had not pinned out and they were months and/or years when it looked like and all of them were going to fail, he would’ve basically been, I’ll say broke. I mean he wouldn’t have been destitute on the street but he would not have had very much money because it was all tied up in these companies. And then they have all succeeded widely and he is making a bazillion dollars now and certainly he’s not doing it for the money but I was really impressed by this guy’s ability to deal with stress, his ability to work extremely, extremely hard for long periods of time and just a sheer raw intelligence, like his IQ must be off the charts. So it was a really enjoyable lesson for me, if you haven’t listened to it, I definitely recommend it just a tail of someone who perseveres and then puts it all on the line over and over and is really changing the world frame, I mean a lot of startups talk about starting something to change the world and it’s like yeah, you’re building a delivery service for cat food or whatever, I don’t know how much that changes the world but the stuff Elon Musk is doing now, is literally driving our species forward.
Mike [04:21]: There’s demons in the closet too.
Rob [04:23]: What do you mean?
Mike [04:24]: How do I put it? Like I’ve heard stories and stuff like his divorce and how his ex-wife has come out and said that it was just very difficult living with him because he was so driven to succeed and so driven towards certain different things –
Rob [04:37]: I think that’s really important to call out actually. If you look at the “great people” like the Henry Fords, the Ben Franklins, the George Washingtons, the, I don’t know the great industrialist or the Steve Jobs, or the Bill Gates or the people who do big things, like this, they almost always, almost invariable have complete train wrecks for personal lives because they value their goal of doing the business or of changing the world or whatever how do you, more than they value people. And so, I don’t model myself after these people, right? I mean I’ve chosen the exact opposite. But, they have multiple divorces, they had all these terrible marriages, a lot of them have kids that disown them. I think Ben Franklin and all of kids disowned him. Steve Jobs –
Mike [05:18]: Steve Jobs disowned his own kids, I mean –
Rob [05:20]: They’re train wrecks, and it’s actually interesting to remember Sarah Hatter had a quote a couple of years ago at MicrConf. She said, “Don’t take business advice from people who have terrible personal lives, or don’t have work-life balance or something like that.” I really take that to her, like I’m not going to start a business like Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs, or any of those guys. But unfortunately, those seem to be the folks that actually do kind of change things on a world scale.
Mike [05:41]: I wonder how much of that is about the control that they exert over the business and I mean because if you look at Steve Job as an example, I mean he’s notorious for having exerted, absolute control over various parts of the business, and in your persona life, it’s very difficult to do that because there are people in life. They’re not your employees. Your kids are not your employees. Your wife is not your employee or your spouse or whoever. And so you can’t exert that level of control or that degree that you could if it was the business and you are basically given the person a paycheck. So, I think that it becomes difficult for them to deal with their personal lives because they can’t exert that control and maybe that’s why there are train wrecks.
Rob [06:22]: For sure. I would say that’s a big part of it. The other thing I think is it’s like being obsessed with your goal. It’s being kind of a workaholic I’ll say. It’s like if you work 80 or 90-hour a week which all of the people that I mentioned did, if not more, I think Elon is working 100 hour a week or some crazy thing and he’s done it for years, you can’t really maintain relationships with a life that looks like that.
Mike [06:43]: No, I mean and he kind of goes even one-step further I think, doesn’t he? He owns two public companies, doesn’t he? The SpaceX and Tesla, is SpaceX public?
Rob [06:51]: SpaceX is not public.
Rob [06:52]: It’s not public.
Rob [06:53]: I think SolarCity might be.
Mike [06:55]: And either way, I mean that’s still a heck of a lot of responsibility and probably not enough time to deal with all of it and once you’re trying to throw personal life in there, it’s hard to carve that out. So you need to have somebody within your personal life who’s going to be understanding that they are certainly not the number one priority and they may not even make the top 10.
Rob [07:12]: Yeah. So what are we talking about today?
Mike [07:15]: Well, today, what we’re going to do, is we’re going to go through 14 ideas for a high-impact lead magnets. And I was thinking about this because I’ve talked to a bunch of people recently about the types of things that they can offer as part of their website in order to get people to basically handover their email address. So, I think that most common one that I’ve seen that’s been recommended is an email course of some kind and obviously you’re very familiar with those through Drip. But I think that there’s other ones that people either overlook in favor of an email course that are potentially less work or have a different RY in certain cases or a better fit for certain types of customer. So what I wanted to do is go through some of these different ideas for different lead magnets because I think that people just kind of clause over them and think that an email course is the only one and it’s probably one of the better ones but I don’t think that’s the only one that people should be looking at. So I think before we start, we want to talk about exactly what a lead magnet is. And, as it kind of implies, lead magnet is designed to essentially help you generate leads and that could be leads for your product or for a course that you’re selling or just want to add to your email list. But, the basic idea is that you’re creating something and you’re offering it to them in exchange to get it for their email address. And so, that’s the primary goal for you is to get some of these email address. But you have to be able to provide them something of value that is significant enough that they’re going to give you that email address. So, the whole premise behind a lead magnet is that you’re using it to essentially bribe somebody to give you their email address.
Rob [08:46]: Yeah. And I’ve heard people call it an opt-in bribe and I don’t like that term. To me, it has like a negative connotation to it. I’ve always called it an opt-in reward but I think a lead magnet is probably a better term and a more common term for this. So to kick us off, the first idea we have for lead magnets is of course an email course and that’s what you mentioned. I tend to lean towards email courses, five-day, and seven-day email courses work really well. The real reason that I like them the most is it gets a subscriber used to hearing from you on a regular basis and it gets them used to opening your emails and they do tend to consume them because they’re smaller pieces of content. If you send someone, let’s say an E-book or a PDF, I don’t know how many of those I have on my desktop or in some folders somewhere that I’ve never read whereas when I sign up for email courses, I do tend to read them when I have spare time. I’ll read them on my mobile if they’re in my certain category in Gmail. I just think they’re consumed more. I think it gets subscribers used to hearing from you and opening emails which also tells spam filters that people are opening and reading your email. Gmail, I know uses behavior to determine whether it should deliver the emails under the promotions of the other tabs and I think that getting a five or seven to eight mail course kicked off will get the rest of your emails into their inbox, I mean if people are reading the early ones. So, that’s why I like put them together. I also think they’re fairly easy to assemble and we give away a free kind of blueprint which is the shell of putting the other five-day course. And even if you don’t sign up for Drip, we give it away in our knowledge base and we can link that up and shown us, but we have a bunch of blueprints that people use within Drip if you’re a customer and you can just link and kind of enter some specific content to you but the intro and the outro are already in there so that it doesn’t take a ton of time to set one of these up.
Mike [10:29]: Yeah, I’m a big fan of email courses as well and they work well as you said that I do train people to open your emails and they do help you bypass some of the spam filters because if Google recognizes or other email providers recognize that you are not flagging those as spam and you are taking action inside of that email course, then it is more likely to let other things through when you are for example presenting a specific offer to somebody or you’re running a flash sale or just a regular promotion of any kind. They’re going to let that through because they already let five or seven other emails through that you accepted and you looked and you probably clicked through. So, that’s very helpful from the standpoint of the person offering it. And if the person is getting value out of it, then clearly, they’re going to clicking on those.
Rob [11:15]: If I could think of maybe two drawbacks to give the other side of the story. I think email courses do take longer to create than some of the options we’re going to list. And I think in some markets, they might be oversaturated with email courses and they might be valued less than say an E-book or a cheat sheet.
Mike [11:32]: I think one of the other good points about an email course is that it helps to promote trust and it helps to establish you as some sort of an expert and whatever the industry is that you are promoting the email course on. So if you’ve created an email course on how to create landing pages for example. Whoever is receiving those is going to look at you as essentially the fact to expert of landing pages, and that may not necessarily be true but that’s going to be their perception. And when it comes to selling to that audience, the perception piece of it is extremely important.
Rob [12:04]: You said that it builds trust. I also like that it builds trust over time. Even if it’s only five or seven days, if someone hears from you every day, there’s just a little bit more of a longer term relationship than if they get one email from you with a PDF toolkit or something and you redirect and you’re like, “Oh, that was cool.” It’s not something where you’ve touched with them every day. So I think there’s probably a difference in the trust level there.
Mike [12:24]: The next lead magnet that you can use is the report of some kind. And for example this, you can head over to micropreneur.com, put in your email address, and you’ll get a short PDF that essentially outlines the high level concepts of what a micropreneur is and kind of walks you through the thought process behind starting a business and micropreneur.com is a website that Rob and I host, part of the Micropreneur Academy. But you can generate a report and create a PDF or a word document that can be associated with a landing page where people can just go in and they enter in their email address and they will get a report, and that report can be a sample report from the application that you have. It could be a sample set of data. It can even just be what you stand for. What source of ideas that you’re trying to promote your manifesto so to speak. So, there’s a lot of different ways that you’re going to leverage your report like that but my advice I think in most cases would probably be to use a specific landing page for that report because you really want that to be on its own page where you’re driving traffic to it that is relevant to that, and I think that if you have multiple different types of reports that you’re going to offer, then you need to be able to drive traffic that is relevant to that type of report and sometimes you’re going to be able to change the landing page copy and sometimes it’s going to be a little bit more difficult just because of the type of people who are coming. So, let’s say that you are doing something around email marketing, there’s going to be people who are much further along and you’re going to want to offer them a different type of report than somebody who is much more entry level. So, you have to balance those types of things and I probably wouldn’t necessarily recommend putting both of those on the same page for example.
Rob [13:59]: Right. And the other advantage to a report is if your audience happens to be more audio inclined, let’s say it’s something to do with podcast or you know that they might listen to podcast, you can turn a report into an audio report pretty quickly with a USB headset, read for 15-20 minutes, do a little bit of editing, and then you have now a report in PDF and an audio version of it, it’s pretty powerful. I mean it’s worth a lot to a lot of people to be able to listen to that. The other advantage by the way of having it on its own page is if you’re going to build links to it, you can get some SEO juice and rank for a specific term. And now, in some cases, it’s not relevant, but in others, having it hosted on your own website can just be better. My third idea for high-impact lead magnet is a cheat sheet or a handout. I’ve also heard Clay at LeadPages called this like a tools list, top 10 tools to get really good at taking pictures or top 10 things that the best gardeners use to trim their hedges or whatever. The nice part about this thing, the biggest advantage is these are pretty easy to put together especially if you’re already in a space and you’re knowledgeable, you could probably type this up as text in 5 or 10 minutes off the top of your head, and it intrigues people. People like tools lists, people like cheat sheets. I think there’s some value in just getting something out there quickly.
Mike [15:15]: I like that idea of just typing up something in Word or Notepad or something like that and that at least gets the ideas out of your head and then you can turn around and hand it off to a designer who could then make it look pretty and could make it something that could actually be printed out. I’ve seen things from Dave Collins over at software promotions where they have a Google AdWords cheat sheet which is essentially a kind of a four-page flier that walks through all these different concepts about how you should be using Google AdWords and what sort of things you should be paying attention to, which sorts of [gulches?] there are or areas where you need to take a little bit of extra care and it talks about each and every single one of those on this Google AdWords cheat sheet and it’s really well put together. There’s tons and tons of information on it. I’ve had that cheat sheet laying around for probably close to a year and a half now, I mean it’s really good.
Rob [16:01]: Other nice thing about a cheat sheet is if you just type this up in a text editor real quick and then you go into something like Microsoft Word or Publisher and just get one of the reasonable templates, you don’t need something fancy but just something that looks reasonably professional, you can kind of paste it in there, use their existing styles, and maybe not even need to hire anybody to make it look cool. And so if you can get by without having to invest a lot of time or money on this one.
Mike [16:26]: The next lead magnet is a template. So, you can make a downloadable template for a variety of different things. And these I think appeal very much to the do-it-yourself crowd especially if your application, whatever your app is automates the stuff inside of the template and tracks everything for you. I think a really good example of this is if you go over to Bidsketch, you can download some sample templates of what their proposals look like, and you can even just modify them yourself if you really want it to and just say, “Okay. I’m going to use this as my template and you wouldn’t have to necessarily buy the application. The application makes it a heck of a lot easier to replicate that over time and keep them all in one place and do all sorts of other things, but as a basic template to essentially get someone started, they’re still valuable because they can use them by hand until they get to a point where in their business, it makes sense for them to invest in a tool that will automate some of the rest of the stuff.
Rob [17:17]: And LeadPages did this a lot in the early days. I think they still do it when they talk about a landing page template, in a blog post, and then at the bottom for an email opt-in to give away that template in HTML and obviously that template is available inside LeadPages if you sign up and I heard that it is very successful for them. Tim Pages talked about that on a couple of webinars. Our fifth idea for high-impact lead magnet is to give away a free video. So a training video, a walkthrough of something and I think the key here is that video overtime, it used to be super, super valuable because no one was producing it but over time I feel like it’s becoming maybe a little less valuable. And so just giving away a single video, it depends on the market, right, but some people might not be that wowed with it. It’s also, you can’t listen to it on the go and you need to carve out time with audio. You probably not going to want to watch it at work in your cubicle or whatever. So there’s some drawbacks to it in terms of it’s a little bit more difficult to consume than these other things. However, if you have a pretty well-produced video and you keep things pace pretty quickly and you have a really good title for it like three secrets you must know in order to do email marketing or the walkthrough that no one else will show you or whatever. I mean something that intrigues and kind of builds that interests, I think those a lot of value. The other thing is if you’re reasonably good, whether if it’s on camera or doing a screen cast, video can be super easy to produce and take you 5 or 10 minutes if you can get it done for a couple of takes. I might produce a bunch of screen cast and they get easier and easier overtime. And so, this is one that could potentially a hyper super value if you title it correctly and then keep the pacing moving but really not take a ton of time to produce.
Mike [18:57]: The thing that I really like about doing a video is that if you have a link back to your site for them to do the video and you’re not embedding the video directly into the email, you can get a sense of how much people are actually watching them by using the analytics on your webpage to figure out whether people are watching 30 seconds into the video and just cancelling it or watching the entire video. And I know that there are certain ways to see how much people are leveraging the things that you are sending. So for example, if you send somebody an email course, you can look at open rates. If you’re sending people a PDF, you can check the download numbers and things like that. But just because somebody downloaded the PDF doesn’t mean that they actually ever opened it and looked at it. And again, there are some tools that will allow you to do that but it’s a lot more advanced and it’s a little bit less obvious that you’re going to be to get that information whereas with the video, you can track to see how far into the video is people are watching and if you need to re-record some parts of the video or see which parts are resonating when people because they watched that part of the video three or four times, you can get that information and that’s why I really like the idea of using these videos to send people to a webpage and monitor the usage on that page.
Rob [20:03]: If you’re going to record a video, I would say record it as quickly as you can in terms of keeping the pacing going really fast and then have someone edit it so that when you’re typing, it just appears on the screen. No one wants to sit there and watch you type. And you can take like an eight-minute demo and crunch it down to between four and six minutes pretty easily if you just cut out time to load screens and time for you to fill in forms and all that stuff, and it will definitely increase the number of people who make it through the entire video if the thing moves faster and it’s the shorter overall.
Mike [20:35]: The next lead magnet is a toolkit. And I think tool kits tends to consist the things like checklists, and spreadsheets, and guides about how to do different things. But essentially, it’s a resource that people can leverage to perform a particular task and these are really good for allowing people to manually do something that your application does automatically for them. So if you have this series of steps that somebody would have to go through, you can provide those as a checklist or they could purchase your application and it will automatically be taken care of for them. But, if they don’t even know what those steps are, chances are good that you can take a lot of those things and add them into a checklist or a spreadsheet and package it up and allow them to download it as a toolkit and you can market that toolkit in exchange for the email address so that you can then upsell them later to your full application. So the seventh idea is a free trial, and when I say free trial, most people will say, “Oh, it’s a free trial of the application.” And I think that that’s probably the wrong way to pitch it when you’re offering this as a lead magnet because you don’t want to offer it as a free trial. You want to offer, so let’s say you’re giving them 14 free days of your application, you want to offer them 14 days of whatever the beneficial output is. So for example, Ruben Gamez who owns Bidsketch, he offers a 14-day trial for proposals that can help you make money for your business. And that’s the way it’s offered. It’s not offered as a 14-day free trial for Bidsketch, it’s offered as that 14 days of proposals for you. So it’s a very slight difference in the way that it’s marketed.
Rob [22:04]: Yeah. Kind of pitching the benefit rather than the pitching the fact that you’re going to have to spend a bunch of time getting on-board it into an application or pitching the benefit rather than the work the person has to do to get the benefit.
Mike [22:15]: Exactly.
Rob [22:16]: Our eight idea for a high-impact lead magnet is an E-book or a physical book. Obviously, this tends to be a lot more work than something like a report. I would typically think a report is maybe 5 to 20 pages whereas an E-book, I would think 40 to 100 pages, 40 to 200 pages. And a physical book is probably in the realm, I mean you could have a paperback book that’s 50, 60, 70 pages. I know Jason Cone had used this at a smart bear where he wrote a book about code reviews and would give away paperback copies. I don’t remember if you had to pay shipping. I think they might just give it away.
Mike [22:50]: Nope, they gave it away. Yup.
Rob [22:51]: Yeah. They gave it away totally and they covered the cost and he said that when they would go in to do sales calls and they saw that book up on the shelf, it was a shoe and because they had literally written the book on the topic. So it’s a total no-brainer. I think if you’re marketing your price point more [?] than you have the time or can produce something like this, I think this is pretty valuable.
Mike [23:10]: The ninth idea is access to a community. And I’ve seen this a lot in different info products but you can offer access a set of forearms or choose a [slot shot?] instance or anything along those lines where people are essentially buying into this community aspect for a particularly type of product. And I think that it works really well when you’re trying to educate people about how to do something whether that’s design skills or programming skills or how to build a business or how to do an email campaign. There’s lots of different ways that people want to communicate and by providing them access to a particular community, that can be one benefit that people will buy into. One that I see do this really, really well is growthhackers.com where you go over there and one of the benefits of growthhackers.com is just having access to that community. And by joining the community, they get your email address. So, it’s really an interesting way of harvesting email addresses to send out promotional emails or educational emails and use those as leads for your products or your business.
Rob [24:13]: The 10th idea for lead magnet is a swipe file, so a collection of tools, information, guides, or text snippets, et cetera that you have picked up from your experience in the niche. So if you are selling at the copywriters, then that’s probably a really common swipe file that I’ve heard of is a bunch of headline ideas. Here’s my swipe file of 100 of the best headlines that I’ve ever seen and they serve as good inspiration and frankly a good swipe file is worth quite a bit. And if you already have it lying around, it’s kind of a no-brainer to issue it and it certainly doesn’t need to be formatted very well, that’s the other advantage. You could literally just do it as a Word doc or a text file.
Mike [24:50]: Our 11th idea is running a webinar and I like webinars because they have the sense of reality to it where it’s not just a video for webinar, the idea that you’re kind of pitching to people is they have to show up and I’ve seen people put into their webinar email campaigns, and when you’re inviting you they say, “Oh, we only have space for so many people.” And sometimes, just because they want to say that and it’s part of their marketing copy. Other times, there are technical limitations on the software that they’re using. So, depending on their level of go-to webinar for example, there might only be 25 space or 100 spaces available for them to run the webinar. And that can be a very good incentive for people to sign up and attend the webinar, but because it is a live session, you can ask questions on the spot and if you’re really interested in it, you’re going to show up and you’re going to be there for the live webinar versus the recording that may or may not be emailed afterwards.
Rob [25:43]: I’ve been skeptical of webinars because I’m just not a fan of them personally but very huge. Everyone who I hear who starts doing them has a lot of success with them. So, I think there’s a real value that people put on a live presentation like this and I think it’s absolutely something that you’ll want to move to though it’s a bit time intensive to set up obviously and it’s something you have to do on an ongoing basis. It’s not like a toolkit or an E-book that you can write ones and give away, but already, the webinars that we’ve done for Drip in partnering with other companies, they have been quite successful in terms of the number of trials we get out of them. So I think there’s a lot of value there.
Mike [26:21]: Well, you mentioned the part about it’s time intensive to do and you’ll have to create multiple webinars. I think you want to be able to pitch it to different segments of the population in different ways, especially if it’s for the exact same products. But if you have a sequence of let’s say six or eight different webinars that you’ve put together that are related are similar or overlapping in some way, shape, or form and you’ve Twit the copy and headlines and things like that, you can then repeat them because if people didn’t make it to one of them, if they’re on your email list, then you could potentially get them to one of your other webinars.
Rob [26:52]: Our 12th idea for lead magnet is a case study. So it’s like a deep dive into a specific type of problem of before and after, so what’s great is if you have existing customers, it’s so easy to do case studies because you can just interview them on Skype and either use that, do a video case study of it. You can have it transcribed or you could just take notes off of it and write out blog post case studies that can have a lot of impact because people get to see the true before and after of using your service, and there’s value there even though you don’t have to produce a ton of the content.
Mike [27:23]: Our 13th lead magnet is free consultations. And I think with the free consultation, you really need to be very targeted on the type of problems that you’re solving, but I think that that’s also a very good legion for a high-priced product. I don’t think that you want to do free consultations for a product that’s $39 or anything like that. But if you have a relatively high-price product, then those free consultations can turn into thousands, and thousands of dollars or revenue or annual contracts. I mean it just kind of depends on what it is that you’re offering. But at the of the day, you want to be able to have that consultations you can get on people’s radar and talk to people directly. This is I think extremely important early on when you’re still trying to figure out what your ideal customer is, but again, it goes back to what your price point is. And if you have a higher price product, it works a lot better than if you have a lower price product because it’s just not going to be worth it if the price point is below a certain point.
Rob [28:13]: And our 14th and final idea for high-impact lead magnets are to do a short interview and get a transcript as well. And what I like about this one is you can give away two formats, so you have both audio and something in text and this doesn’t require you to create much content and you can just pick an expert in the space. So, for example with email marketing. I interviewed Patrick McKenzie about a bunch of different pacific, marketing questions and then have it transcribed, and we have video of it. You can make an audio of it. And so, you don’t have to create the content but you get an expert who is essentially lending their credibility to it ending at some really good opt-in rates if people know who that expert is because you have name recognition. And so, even if you’re in a niche where you are not an expert. Let’s say you were doing horseback riding or something, you just need to find that big name and interview them. They probably haven’t been interviewed by many people if you’re in a small niche, and then you don’t have to learn all the stuff. You have a little bit of content there that you’re able to kick out. So, I’ve always like this idea as a way to get a lead magnet up pretty quickly but one that has quite a bit of value to it.
Mike [29:20]: So those are the 14 different ideas for high-impact lead magnets, and I think that there’s a couple of things that you want to consider when trying to decide on what lead magnet you’re going to create and I think the very first one is what is the goal of that lead magnet? What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? Is it that you are trying to get people to trust you? Is it that you’re trying to get people to have familiarity with you or brand awareness or are you trying to establish yourself as an expert? That is probably going to dictate the majority of what the content is. And then you also have to think about what types of formats your audience is going to be interested in consuming. Is it going to be video? Is it going to be swipe files? Is it going to be an email course? What is appropriate for not only the goals that you’re trying to achieve but the way that your audience is going to consume that information. And the last thing to think about is, what type of prospect do you think that you’re going to attract? And I think that’s probably an extremely important piece of it because if you’re attracting the wrong people, then it’s probably not a good idea to create that type of lead magnet. So to recap our 14 ideas for high-impact lead magnets. Number 1 an email course, number 2 a report, 3 three cheat sheets or handouts, number 4 templates, number 5 free videos, number 6 tool kits, number 7 free trials, number 8 E-books or physical books, number 9 access to a community, number 10 swipe files, number 11 webinars, number 12 case studies, 13 free consultations, and 14 interviews with transcripts. And the last thing to mention is we’ll link up a couple of different resources from this podcast and the show notes for this episode. You will find them over at digitalmarketer.com and petovera.com.
Rob [30:53]: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by Moot used under creative commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.
